DgcityOn the windswept plateau north of Beijing, archaeologists are filling in one of the key turning points in the Chinese past: the moment when wandering hunter-gatherers began to settle down and plant grain. New results from the Xinglong site in Kangbao county, Zhangjiakou, lay out that transition in unusual detail across more than 6,000 years.
Xinglong lies near the southeastern edge of the Mongolian Plateau, where a joint team has excavated each year since 2018. Researchers have now built a cultural sequence running from roughly 11,600 years ago to 5,200 years ago. At the oldest locality, an open-air camp held intact hearths, heaps of bone and stone, and a single layer with more than 310 stone tools. A built-up stone platform shows the camp was more than a one-night stop. Earlier levels contain only fine stone tools, while later ones add grinding stones and pottery shards, a sign that groups moved less and less often.
In the summer of 2025 erosion exposed a second locality, with two semi-subterranean houses and an open-air stone-tool workshop covering more than 100 square metres, littered with cores, flakes and manufacturing waste. The oldest planned features are five shallow outdoor hearths, four set in an even southwest-to-northeast line, with millstones and stone spades nearby. A pit beside them held carbonised broomcorn millet together with roe deer and fish bones, dated to about 7,800 to 7,700 years ago.
That combination of millet, aligned hearths and storage pits marks the slow germination of dry-land farming in northern China. Researchers describe Xinglong as a rare East Asian record of how people exploited a window of warmer, wetter climate to shift from high mobility to semi-settled village life, an early chapter in the wider story of Chinese agriculture.
The broader stakes are large. Northern Chinese dry farming, built on broomcorn and foxtail millet, is one of the world’s few independent centres of plant domestication, yet the thin northern archaeological record had long made its earliest stages hard to trace. Most sites of this age sit far to the south and east, in the Yellow River plain; Xinglong, more than a thousand metres up on the plateau edge, shows that the transition unfolded in marginal country too, as foragers fitted farming into a life still heavy with hunting and fishing.
